Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
Well, Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows Vista has been officially released, for those of you who have been anxiously waiting for it. You can download it from Windows Update, or Microsoft’s website at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb738089.aspx
Supposedly, this operating system update has had quite a few security bugs fixed, as well as being optimized so that it runs faster. It has been reported that installations of SP1 are quite a bit faster.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
Even though this is not within the usual scope of the blog, I hope that few will fail to see the beauty of these pictures of one of the earth’s more spectacular processes. I stumbled on the website, Extreme Instability, a couple of years ago, and thought that some of you might enjoy it, as well. If you also have an interest in tornadoes, or just nature photos in general, please check out his website.
If there ever was anyone who should be an earth scientist, it’s Mike Hollingshead. Here’s a guy who loves taking pictures of nature, and chasing storms. After dropping out of college a few times, and kicking around several uninspiring jobs, he just decided that he was going to make a living doing what he loved. And, here are some of the results…..
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Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue licensing Windows XP to OEM’s (Original Equipment Manufacturers), and terminate retail sales of the XP operating system on June 30, 2008. This is less than four months from now, so if you’re planning to buy a new computer, and you want XP installed on it, you had better do it soon.
However, Microsoft indicates in their Support Lifecycle for Windows XP Page, that mainstream support most versions of XP will continue to 04/19/09. “Extended” support will still be available (for a price) until 04/08/14.
Unfortunately, we will only be postponing the inevitable because it looks like we will all be forced to move to Vista eventually, whether we want to or not. Here’s some info that I gathered recently, for those visitors considering updating your computer operating system (OS) to Windows Vista, sooner, rather than later.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
Well, it’s been nearly three months since I started the blog, so I thought that this would be a good time to update the visitors on the website activity, to date.
I just posted the 53rd article at the end of February, so that means that I generated a new posting about every 1.5 days—or put another way, 65 % of the days have had a new article. This would probably have been higher if I didn’t have to give my wrists a rest, periodically.
There have been nearly a quarter of a million hits total, for an average of nearly 3000 per day, from 56 different countries (every continent except Antarctica). Visitors are reading an average of over 400 pages per day, double that on some days, and it’s increasing nicely.
So, I’m pretty satisfied with the progress, overall. Stay tuned for more……
Copyright © T/X RESOURCES, 1995-2008. All Rights Reserved.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
Imagine a wall of water, with a flow rate of over one million cubic meters (35.31 million cubic feet) per second, rushing towards you—an amount that is 100 times the average flow rate of the Mississippi River today!
If you were crossing the broad chalk ridge (indicated by the thin, red line in the gray-shaded image below) that connected Britain with mainland Europe sometime between 200,000 and 450,000 years ago, you could have witnessed this ridge-busting torrent that ultimately separated the two countries.
See the larger Adobe Reader pdf file (two pages).
You can also watch a video report from the BBC News.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
I’m sure by now, most of our blog visitors have heard about external hard drives. However, if you aren’t familiar with them, they simply allow you to add a hard drive to a computer by attaching it externally (via a plugin socket), instead of having to take the computer apart, and installing the drive internally.
This technology, which is commonly used for storing data, or backup files, has essentially replaced most tape drives. It has been around for quite a while, so I would also guess that many have even purchased “ready-built” enclosures, or like me, built their own.
See the larger Adobe Reader pdf file.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
Ranking the oil reserves of the top 25 countries illustrates the vast difference between first-ranked Saudi Arabia and eleventh-ranked U.S.—we have slightly more than 8% of Saudi Arabia’s total reserves (we do a little better in the category of natural gas reserves however, ranking 6th in the world).
Another sobering statistic derived from this data, is that five of the top six ranked countries (OPEC members Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran and the United Arab Emirates) currently control nearly 55% of the world’s oil reserves (the entire group of OPEC countries control almost 70%!!).
These top five OPEC countries are all within a few hundred miles of each other—the four largest, share common borders. Iraq and Iran, which are potentially the most unstable of the middle-eastern OPEC countries, control almost one-fifth of the world’s oil reserves!!
See the larger Adobe Reader pdf file.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
This plot illustrates a disturbing, long-term trend for the U.S., towards an increasing dependence on imported oil (includes crude oil, and natural gas liquids) to meet our current consumption levels of over 21 million barrels per day (over 892 million gallons)—more than it’s ever been.
Put another way, we currently consume over two decent-sized, domestic oil fields per day!! While consumption (purple graph) has been steadily increas- ing since a low in the early 1980’s, domestic production (blue graph) has been declining since the mid 80’s. Since then, we have been importing an increas- ing amount of crude oil, as evidenced by the diverging trends. Since March 1993, over half of our total domestic consumption of oil, has come from foreign sources—we currently only produce about 32% of the oil we consume.
See the larger Adobe Reader pdf file.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
The latest available salary figures for 2006, published in the AAPG Explorer (April 2007 issue), indicates that overall, salaries climbed 16 percent.
In the six age groups that Mike Ayling of MLA Resources currently tracks, the largest salary increase was 18% in the 15-19 year category. Entry level geologists saw a 9.5% increase, with the 3-5 year category rising 13 percent.
See the larger Adobe Reader pdf file.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
The interrelationship between oil prices, the number of drilling rigs, and the number of mining employees can be seen more clearly in this combined plot. The price of oil (green plot—see posting of 01/22/08) has been a leading indicator of oil industry trends, followed by the drilling rig count (black plot—posting of 01/30/08), seven to nine months later. This is then followed by the number of mining employees (red plot—posting of 01/25/08), one to three months later.
The magenta arrows illustrate the relationships at two points during the last 35 years: one during the industry peak of the early 1980’s, and the other at one of the low points during the late 1990’s.
See the larger Adobe Reader pdf file.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
How cool is this? I just found a new online spreadsheet application that allows you to share, collaborate, and publish spreadsheets that actually work when they are posted on a website, or blog. EditGrid received a very good rating from PC Magazine. The concept is somewhat similar to what is already being done with the online spreadsheet applications of Google Docs, and Zoho. However, the company focuses all of its efforts on the spreadsheet application solely, and apparently does a much better job at it, than either of its competitors.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
This posting is an update of the ”Active Domestic Drilling Rigs and Seismic Crew Count” statistics which I created, and originally posted on the HGS GeoJob Bank ”GeoJob & Energy Statistics” page. However, the HGS page has not been updated since I “retired” as Chair of the Personnel Placement Committee, so I have decided that I would continue updating, and posting the graph here.
See the larger Adobe Reader pdf file.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
I just wanted to let all of the visitors know that you can now write comments (at the bottom of individual postings) without having to register and login to the blog. However, any new submissions will still need to be activated before they become viewable to the general public (to keep down the spam, and possibly inappropriate content).
I had originally thought that having to register and login would be necessary to constrain the spam comments, but it seems to have made it too much of an effort for real commentors.
Anyway, I thought that I would give this a try for a while and see how it works out. Looking forward to seeing your thoughts, and I’m sure that other visitors would be interested in different perspectives as well.
Thanks for visiting Rocks-2-Digits!
Copyright © T/X RESOURCES, 1995-2008. All Rights Reserved.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
I found this to be an interesting piece of news, and since it was somewhat related to geoscience, I thought that I would post it this morning.
From NASA’s Near Earth Object Program website:
On January 29, 2008, asteroid 2007 TU24 will pass within 1.4 lunar distances (334,000 miles) of the earth at 2:33 am, Central time. The asteroid is roughly 250 meters (800 feet) in diameter, and somewhat asymmetrical in shape. This is its closest approach to Earth in more than 2,000 years.
The image above has a resolution of about 20-meters (about 66 feet) per pixel, and was taken by the Goldstone antenna—part of NASA’s Deep Space Network Goldstone station in southern California. Goldstone’s 70-meter (230-foot) diameter antenna is capable of tracking a spacecraft traveling more than 16 billion kilometers (10 billion miles) from Earth.
Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
There are just two kinds of computer users in the world: those who have lost data, and those who are going to lose data.
I fall into the first group, and here’s why. About 10 years ago, I was working for a client (in their office, before I got a workstation), and came in one morning to find that they had lost a year and a half of my seismic interpre- tation. Believe me, that is a sinking feeling. However, after a few days of much consternation by all, they were able to eventually restore all but about a months worth of my work—still unbelievable, but much better than the alternative.
Is your important data being backed up regularly (if ever)? I thought so. Data backup is one of those things that often gets pushed down to the bottom of the to-do list (or completely off the list). With as busy as everyone is these days, the last thing that you want to do is to spend extra time at the computer doing what is seemingly time-wasting work.
If you don’t regularly backup your data, I would recommend that you consider these suggestions, or you will surely join me soon, in that first group:
- Only backup the data that you don’t want to lose.
- Keep at least one copy of a recent backup at an offsite location.
- Only do backup restoration tests on the data that you don’t want to lose.
- Have your computer attached to an Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS).
- Regulary defragment your hard disk(s).
- Regularly test your hard disk(s) for errors and problems.
Here’s what I do: